Topic: superuser.com

Super User is, of course, our site for power users of traditional computer hardware and software. The types of users who have OSX, Linux, and Windows installed in triple-boot fashion — and have built their own computers to run it all on.

Super User has had its share of ewokschallenges to contend with, as it is the most broad site in the trilogy, by far. Depending on your interpretation of the topic, anything about computers could be allowed there!

Fortunately, that’s not the case now, as we have a satellite of new Stack Exchange sites to support Super User, that we hope will foster and engender communities of their own:

It’s our hope that those who love these specific topics will be able to find other like-minded users, so the Super Users themselves can be free to carry on with their indecent love of traditional computing in all its keyboard and mouse-y glory.

And despite being the wild west of topic areas, requiring a nearly superhuman moderation staff …

Four weeks, four winners each week, and the fabulous prizes are appropriately super-user-y.

The best rookie performance of a new user in that week, as measured by the Super User leagues, will receive a 32 GB USB key.

The highest reputation produced in that week, as measured by the Super User leagues, will receive a 22″ LCD monitor.

The “most awesome” new Super User question or answer that week, that most embodies the type of Q&A that make the site great — as judged by the Super User community moderators — will receive a two bay NAS device.

The most useful Meta Super User question or answer of the week — as judged by the Super User community moderators — gets a Super User t-shirt and stickers.

Update 8/25/10: friend of Super User, Jon Tackabury of Binary Fortress Software, generously offered to contribute a free license to DisplayFusion Pro for every winner as well! Thanks Jon for your support of the SU community!

The contest starts right now, as of the publish date on this blog post, but the four weekly awards will be announced on Meta Super User on these dates:

You must have a registered Super User account in good standing, with a valid email address, to be eligible.

Contest open to every man, woman, and child on planet Earth, except those men, women, or children living in places where contests like this are somehow illegal — or the relevant contest laws in your jurisdiction are so obnoxious that awarding the prize becomes impractical.

Moderators of any kind are not eligible to win, because they will be judging parts of the contest. But they won’t be left out in the cold, either: we’ll be sending our community mods a little thank you prize as well, for everything they’ve done. You guys rock!

You cannot win the same category twice during the duration of the contest. So if you’re the top reputation user for weeks #2 and #3, for week #3 we will award that prize to the next user in the weekly reputation league.

You cannot win two prizes in the same week.

If you live in an area of the world where it is logistically impossible for us to get your prize to you — like, say, because your nearest computer hardware store is 3000 nautical miles away — we’ll do our best to work with you and make it happen.

We will try to be as fair as possible, but all of our judgments are final and binding.

Happy first birthday, Super User, hopefully first of many more to come. And most of all, thanks to everyone who has participated on Super User. It’s because of you that the site works at all!

Ever since Imgur accounts were released, people have been asking non-stop about the ability to upload into their accounts by using the tools. Your request did not go unheard. Today, I’m pleased to announce the new Imgur API, which not only includes support for uploading into accounts, but also includes support for managing every aspect of your account.

Here are just a few of the things you can do:

Upload images anonymously

Upload images into accounts

Create and manage photo albums

Delete images

List all images in your account

Don’t worry if you’re a not a technical person and you don’t care about what an API is. What it means is that, very soon, you will have access to many more tools that enable you to upload into your account from your desktop, mobile phone, iPad, etc.

If you’ve been following our new Stack Exchange 2.0 private and public betas, you may have noticed that every new website launches with its own dedicated meta site.

If we’ve learned anything (and I personally had to learn this lesson by having it beaten into me), it is that meta-discussion is an absolutely integral part of any healthy community. So much so, that I question whether any community without a meta site can actually survive in the wild. It’s certainly not a mistake we’re ever going to repeat again.

We tried to make these new per-site metas fairly discoverable with both a site wide notification banner of the form …

got a question about the site itself? meta.topic is the place to talk about things like what questions are appropriate, what tags we should use, etc.

… and a prominently featured link to switch between the site and the meta site at the top left of both.

(update: we’ve changed the layout a bit. The links to meta and parent are still at the top, but shifted over to the right as plain text links — the stackexchange navigation takes its place on the left. And the link to meta is now in the sidebar like so, with the top weekly meta questions — or meta questions with the special moderator-only “featured” tag.)

Click that “meta” link at the top left to go to meta (shocking, I know), and click “parent” in the same location to get back to the parent site.

However, you should know that these per-site (or “child”) metas behave significantly differently than what you might be used to on meta.stackoverflow.com, if you participated there. Based on our existing experience with Meta Stack Overflow, we tried to improve and simplify in a few ways:

You never have to log in to the per-site meta. It grabs the cookie from the parent site and already “knows” who you are when you visit.

Identity is always inherited from the parent site. If you have an account on the parent site, you automatically have an account on the per-site meta. Your profile can only be edited on the parent site. And of course, moderators on the parent are moderators on the per-site meta.

Reputation is always inherited from the parent site. You cannot gain or lose reputation* on the per-site meta. This also means that some reputation related functions like the rep graph and bounties are not enabled on the per-site meta.

You must have a minimum of 5 rep on the parent site to participate on the per-site meta. In general, the more reputation you have on the parent site, the more stake you should have in its governance. And the converse is also true: if you have no reputation on the parent site (as in 1 rep, the minumum), you haven’t even come of age to “vote” in governance issues, so to speak. We also expect that most established users will have the +100 network account association bonus, so they won’t be affected.

Voting up or down does not affect reputation. You are now free to vote purely based on post content, without worrying about how your vote might positively or negatively affect someone’s reputation score.

* however, there is one exception: extreme misbehavior on the meta site will affect your parent site reputation. And not in, shall we say, the “good” way.

In fact, we’re so happy with the way these per-site metas are working on the Stack Exchange 2.0 sites, we’re extending the per-site metas to Super User and Server Fault as of right now!

For now we are leaving meta.stackoverflow.com grandfathered in, as-is, with no changes; it’s still a standalone community with a standalone reputation system. We think Stack Overflow is large enough to justify this, and it just so happens that Stack Overflow is also the name of the company, too. Meta Stack Overflow will serve as the “National Capital” where we process feedback not just for Stack Overflow but for the core engine itself — while the smaller meta sites are akin to regional or state capitals. So, in a nutshell:

At the behest of the Super User moderators, we’ve instituted a new question status of protected. A protected question is like a protected wikipedia article — it no longer allows additions by anonymous users.

Protected questions are indicated in the standard question footer like so:

protected by {moderator name} 3 days ago

This question is protected to prevent “thanks”, “me too!”, and spam posts from new users. To answer it, you must have more than 10 reputation.

We needed this because some of the more popular Super User questions attracted a lot of noise from random drive-by users who didn’t understand how our system works — users who helpfully provided so-called answers like “thanks, this worked for me!” or “I have this problem too, can anyone help?” And lots of them.

While we used to lock these kinds of questions, that’s not really what a lock was intended for. Locking a question is a bit of a nuclear option in this scenario, as locking prevents the question from getting votes, comments, or edits when the question itself wasn’t even the problem.

So, in the future, if you see a question that is attracting a lot of drive-by noise answers, please flag it for moderator attention. We’ll turn on protection. The protection bar is extraordinarily low right now — you only need >= 10 reputation to post an answer to a protected question — but we think this is enough to cut down dramatically on answer noise for certain unlucky, but obviously popular, questions.

It’s called Stack Apps because, well, that’s what it is — a place for applications that run on our “Stack”. You can either find existing apps that are already out there, or learn how to write your own apps.

Fair warning, though, this is still a beta, albeit a public and more stable beta.

Version 1 is read only. Coming up with a solid API is hard enough without adding writing and authentication to the mix. For the initial release, it’s a read-only API. We’ll take on the much more challenging problem of writing (and authentication) in v2.

The API may change during the public beta. While we expect far, far less breakage than we had during the private beta, the intent of this public beta is to keep improving the API, so there may be changes. We want the API polished up for a formal “locked in” V1.0 release about 2 months from now.

If you build to our API, we will support you. We’ll be on Stack Apps daily helping out in any way we can, and listening to all your feedback. If you’re contributing your valuable time building an app on our API, the least we can do is provide a stable platform for you to build on. We plan to have a solid 1.0 API that is reliable and supported for a very long time. That’s a promise.

If you’re interested in applications that run on all current and future Stack-engined based sites, please participate in the public Stack Exchange API beta. Visit Stack Apps, see what you think, and give us your feedback. Help us create an API that doesn’t suck!